Intern Amber Peckham remembers outsider artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth.
As a sixth grader on a field trip to Washington DC, I was fortunate enough to see one of Jimmy Lee Sudduth’s works, Fantastic Building, on display at the Smithsonian Institute. It was the only painting that lingered in my mind on the long drive home, simultaneously conjuring up fond memories of sand castles and horrific daydreams of prisons and boarding schools.
Fantastic Building, c.a. 1970’s, Smithsonian Institute
Intrigued, and mildly bored once summer came, I decided to further explore Sudduth’s work and was amazed by the depth of his innovation. To keep his mud paint from crumbling off the plywood he used as canvas, Sudduth mixed it with sugar, honey, and even diet Pepsi, and to color the mud he used herbs and flowers from the woods around his home, where he spent most of his youth in the company of his medicine-woman mother. He painted using only his fingers and claimed to have discovered 36 different kinds of mud in his home state of Alabama.